Thursday, December 31, 2015

This is How Denialism Ends, one Delingpole at a Time

They come faster than they used to -- one denier after another giving it up, acknowledging the warming that's taking place, and the role of humans in creating it.

Today's crack -- loud and sharp -- come from Breitbart, an extremely conservative site that I can't imagine any thinking person takes seriously as a source of news. (They banned me from commenting there long ago.) Today they have a story that reveals everything:

This is how denialism ends, friends. Exactly how.

They just admitted that global warming is happening. They just don't like what they assume is the solution.

Of course, no one likes to admit defeat. So they go out, naturally, in a fit of rage, spitting and sputtering, disparaging everyone, insulting all, hating even themselves -- because that's about all denialsim is anymore, rage, anger -- even though now they apparently accept the science. James Delingpole writes:

I’m proud to say that I come in at number 6 (though obviously I would have preferred higher) with my statement that alarmist climate scientists are “a bunch of talentless low lives who cannot be trusted.”

In retrospect I wish to apologise for that sentence.

What I really should have said is that these are a bunch of lying, cheating, scum-sucking, bottom-feeding, third-rate tosspots who don’t even deserve the name “scientists” because what they practise isn’t really science but data-fiddling, cherry-picking, grant-troughing, activism-driven propaganda. Posterity will grant them about as much respect as we now accord the 17th century quacks who bled their patients using leeches, or the early 20th century German scientists who helped Hitler compose his diatribe against the discredited Jewish science of Einstein, or the scientists who ganged up on Alfred Wegener for his novel – but correct – theories on continental drift. Really, if none of them ever published another paper in their lives and all their grant funding dried up at midnight tonight, the cause of climate science would not suffer one jot – and the world would become a much better (and richer) place.

So let Delingpole whine. Let him bitch to his small heart's content. He's already ostracized himself to the stark edge. And we know about this clown. It's already been shown that Delingpole is a fool. He doesn't need to read scientific papers. Not that he could understand them anyway.

Not he's just fallen back to the question of solutions.

That's a huge setback for a denier like Delingpole to admit. Huge.

Hey, not all of us like the thought of global governance either.

Frankly, I'd prefer most of the decisions about me and my life be made right here in my own community, this block and a couple of nearby others in the neighborhood. Small is beautiful, and people want -- need -- to determine their lives on as local a scale as possible. We are dying for a lack of it, I think.

But small doens't meet the need of those how want to make an empire, who want power, who want to get rich from it, and it never will. This has been a problem for centuries, and will be so increasingly into the future, I think, with globalization. It will always be a fight. People work better, work more morally as individuals in small groups, where they know names and faces, not as nameless technocrats making decisions for hundreds of millions of people.

So then, Delingpole, let's see your solutions to global warming that accord with your ideology. If, as seems apparent, you now believe in global warming but don't like the solutions proferred on a global scale -- on the scale of Paris, even though the scale of this problem is certainly global -- then instead of denying the science, start proposing solutions to this problem that accord with your ideology and political desires.

Market based? Locally based? Describe them.

Because if you don't start soon, James -- very soon, like now -- you will get stuck with the solutions of others, those you disagree with, your ideological enemies, solutions forced on you by the majority that you twill have to live with.

That's the risk you've been taking now, Delingpole -- and you Watts, and Spencer, and Steyn -- and after Paris it's more clear than ever -- keep up your silliness, your blind, dumb denial, and get stuck with solutions you don't like.

It's about time Delingpole came to this position. Sure, it would take any extremist awhile to come here -- they're extremists, after all.

I still think Anthony Watts will apologize for his denialism before he dies. I do.

Mark Steyn will only if it gets him viewers or listeners or if it sells books. I don't think he has an honest, genuine bone in his body. And you can bet that, when/if he does admit to the science, he will find a way to blame the problem all on those godless liberals, because they didn't do something that would have led to a solution long ago. Watch for it.

Meanwhile, enjoy this quantum leap forward. But they do come. No one has been able to resist the power of science. Ever.

44 comments:

I understand labeling Delingpole a "denier", since he specifically asserts that the problem of man-made global warming is imaginery. OTOH, AFAIK Watts hasn't ever taken such a position, why is he accused of "denial"?

Will climate science as currently understood prove to be a good predictor of future climate? I take the latest IPCC report as the best representation of what climate science currently understands. IMHO the essential prediction of current science is that the planet will continue a long-term warming trend. Beyond that one thing, there's lots of wiggle room in what the science predicts. Three examples:

1. Suppose the globe continues to warm, but at a slow rate consistent with a climate sensitivity of, say, 0.8 deg C. That's outside the current IPCC range of 1.5 to 4.5. However, the IPCC calls this range highly likely, not certain. So, continued warming at alower rate would not be taken to mean that their science was wrong.

2. The IPCC 5th report doesn't explain whether a 10 to 15 year hiatus or slowdown in warming occurred or, if so, what caused it. Suppose it turns out that there was no slowdown. Or, suppose it turns out that there was a slowdown for some reason, such as extra heat going into the ocean or because of some unknown multi-decadal cycle, etc. Such a development wouldn't be taken to mean that the IPCC science was wrong provided that long-term global warming reasserted itself.

3. The IPCC models say that the troposphere will warm faster than the earth's surface. So far, it's been the reverse. Even if that trend continues, that won't be taken to mean that the IPCC science was wrong. Rather, we will say that the IPCC was essentially correct about the planet warming, but not necessarily in every detail.

One may have an opinion of the likely effectiveness of the Paris accord without necessarily understanding the climate science models. My opinion FWIW is that big international meetings are the wrong approach. We need a new energy technology that will replace fossil fuels and at no greater cost than fossil fuels. Money should be spent on developing such a source of energy, not on grandiose meetings.

I see little significant difference between the agreement in Paris and the agreement in Kyoto. Both called for relatively small reductions in CO2 emissions -- reductions too small to prevent the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere from continuing to grow. Both lacked enforcement. Countries failed to fulfill the Kyoto commitments because people didn't want to reduce their standard of living and because they saw no immediate benefit to themselves. I expect the same failure from the Paris accord. It brings to mind Albert Einstein's quote, Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

I suggest you read the IPCC report you refer to yourself. 2nd hand information is much less reliable than going directly to the source.

Especially read WG1 chapter 2. Doing so you'll learn that they indeed discuss the temperature trend during the last 15 years. It says that, owing to natural variability, trends based on short records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not in general reflect long-term climate trends. Try as an example to calculate the 2000 to 2015 temperature trend (which is the very latest) and the slowdown you refer to is completely gone.

That also to some degree explains why a very low climate sensitivity (like the 0,8°C) remains wishful thinking. In the IPCC report they express it (WG1 SMP) as "Extremely unlikely" that climate sensitivity is less than 1°C.

Nowhere in the report they draw the conclusion that that the surface of the earth warms faster than the troposphere.

Anna -- thanks for pointing out that the 5th IPCC report doesn't claim that the troposphere would be expected to warm faster than the surface. That principle was in the 4th IPCC report. That report said, "Above the surface, global observations since the late 1950s show that the troposphere (up to about 10 km) has warmed at a slightly greater rate than the surface, while the stratosphere (about 10–30 km) has cooled markedly since 1979. This is in accord with physical expectations and most model results." http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-3-1.html

Whether or not there's been a slowdown depends on which standard temperature record one looks at. The troposphere report shows a pretty flat trend from 2000 to 2015. http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/ Incidentally, using 2015 as an endpoint may overstate the upward trend, since this is an El Nino year. Similarly, using 1998 as a starting point would understate the upward trend.

I would expect that any short-term slowdown in warming is due to "natural variability", that is, variability due to nature, rather than due to man. However, saying that that the variability is due to nature doesn't mean that it can't be understood. Scientists understand a great many natural processes. However, we currently have little understanding of natural climate variability, short-term or long-term. E.g., we don't know why temperatures dropped between 1880 and 1890 and between 1900 and 1910. We don't know why temperatures rose rapidly from 1910 to 1945. We don't know what caused the Little Ice Age to begin or what caused it to end. The world warmed naturally from 1800 - 1960. We don't know if that natural warming has continued, so we don't know how much of the total warming since 1960 was caused by nature and how much of it was caused by man.

I agree with you that climate sensitivity of 0.8 is wishful thinking. My point was that if this turned out to be the case, climate scientists would still feel that they were essentially correct in their overall conclusions. If sensitivity were that low, it wouldn't mean that the problem disappeared. It would only mean that we would have more time to deal with the problem of global warming.

In this twitter conversation, Gavin Schmidt acknowledges that the troposphere is supposed to warm faster than the surface, according to climate theory. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/12/14/gavins-admission-about-the-satellite-record-versus-the-surface-temperature-record/

I would fault the 5th IPCC report for failing to mention that, in this particular respect, data is inconsistent with theory. An unbiased report should point out data clashing with climate theories as well as data supporting them.

Global warming? Did you say global warming? When did that start? Hasn't happened for the past 19 years despite the big rise in atmospheric CO2. No computer model predicting disaster a hundred years hence (and thus justifying $100 billion pa for a century) was able to predict two decades of no warming whatsoever.

tallrite -- The models are one issue; reality of global warming is another issue. The chart you link to is good evidence that the climate models are unreliable. These models use some unverified assumptions (known in English as "guesses). They have failed to predict accurately. There are also models not used by IPCC showing sensitivities well below 1.5deg C. The climate models shouldn't be relied upon for policy decisions.

However, there's lots of evidence that man's emission of CO2 is causing some amount global warming. The physics and chemistry of the situation says that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. The relatively rapid warming since 1970 or so supports the idea that large amounts of CO2 have contributed to a warming planet. The lack of troposphere warming for the last 18 years could well have been due to some temporary natural cooling that tended to offset the warming caused by man's CO2 emissions.

Here's the most recent 20 years compared to the prior 20. The trends are near identical. The rapid warming of 1975-1995 appears to have continued unabated: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/mean:12/plot/gistemp/from:1975/to:1995/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1995/trend

I'm not sure how you could consider this "two decades of no warming whatsoever"???

Layzej -- You used one temperature series. That one shows a continuation of increasing warming. However, there are perhaps half a dozen reputable temperature series available. Those measuring the troposphere temperature show little recent warming. Until the last few El Nino temperature values showed up, the trend line was flat for about the last 18 years or so. Based on that series, "two decades of no warming" was only a small exaggeration.

There is no such thing as "measuring troposphere temperature". The satellites that provide data for UAH and RSS measure microwave brightness, which the respective organisations then use to create complex computerised models of temperature. There is no purported temperature dataset more heavily adjusted than the satellite temps, literally because the only actual 'temperature' around the MSU satellites is below freezing. In fact, one of the reasons RSS even exists is because there was disagreement about the temperature models UAH made from the satellite data -RSS use the same core data, but with different modelling methods.

Look at the RSS site. Of the 11 zones of the atmosphere measured by the satellites, their temperature models show trends which are consilient with anthropogenic global warming in 10. RSS created a new model which synthesises data from multiple zones, because they were concerned that the one outlying zone is contaminated by readings from the lower stratosphere -which is apparently getting cooler, just as predicted by AGW theory.

Add to this that Spencer and Christy are notorious for not releasing their own code -so nobody knows just how or why their sixth adjustment to the models enlarges the effect of the 1998 El Nino, while reducing the temperature signal of the subsequent years. Their adjustments are several times greater than the tiny effect of NOAA's adjustment (that this small adjustment could remove a supposed 'pause' merely demonstrates just what nonsense it is to fixate on short timeframes). Anyone who genuinely cares about adjustment of temperature records should be demanding to know why UAH made such big changes to theirs and why those changes make it such an outlier compared with other temperature datasets.

Now that a natural oscillation in the form of an El Nion -which had to happen sooner or later- has pushed short term temperature trends back up towards the long term mean, we see a new fixation on the troposphere. Not only does this rely on the single most heavily modeled temperature dataset in existence, it even ignores 90% of the satellite data itself!

What clowns. You are the guy who walks all the way around an elephant, gets to the tail, peers intently at it, then mutters "There aren't enough identifying marks on this tail -there's no saying what kind of animal it is!"

Layzej -- this is the data set I had in mind. http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_November_2015_v6.png The linear trend from 1995 today is quite low.

Mark Ryan -- Yes, the troposphere temperatures have the uncertainties you list. The surface and ocean temperatures have their own laundry list of uncertainties. There's been perhaps thousands of adjustments. Much of the original data was discarded, so there's no way to verify the adjustments. Many weather stations suffered from the urban heat island effect. Ocean temperature measurements are notoriously unreliable.

How can we accurately estimate future warming trends, when we don't even know the actual past trend?

Oh, I see. If you use the as yet unpublished adjustments to the UAH data set you can find little warming. Good job. I wonder why this beta version differs so much from the published version? Has the UAH data set been wrong all this time? Is this new adjusted version correct?

If we look at radiosonde data (actual thermometers in the troposphere) we get a result that is almost identical to the NASA data that you rejected initially: http://i1339.photobucket.com/albums/o716/i_am_kurt_w/radiosonde_surface_zpsqaf01lk5.png

So which data should we trust... all of the published data sets that show either continued or accelerated warming - including the published UAH data set, or the as yet unpublished adjustments to the UAH data set?

Also, I am curious to know your thoughts on my initial question. If sensitivity of 6C is more likely than sensitivity of 0.8C, which should we plan for? 0.8C, 6C, or something in between?

From your link to kurt_w's photobucket, I assume you're kurt_w. Hey, there are a whole bunch of us who miss your posts over at the Isthmus forum. I learned a lot from you. I was sorry to see you go, but I can understand your reasons for leaving.

Here's my answer your last question, Layzej. IMHO we should devote our resources to improving the infrastructure and seeking a new source of cheap energy that doesn't depend on fossil fuels. to radically cut CO2 emissions would cost many lives. I don't want to follow such Draconian policies, when we don't know whether they're needed or whether they're sufficient.

Note that our current policy, as reflected in the toothless Paris agreement, isn't planning for sensitivity of 0.8 or 6 or anything in between. It's pretty close to doing nothing. It won't prevent atmospheric CO2 from continuing its rapid rise. If sensitivity is very low, we don't need this agreement. We have plenty of time to figure out how to deal with global warming. If sensitivity is high, the Paris agreement is entirely inadequate and we're all screwed.

I agree that we shouldn't trust any of them. I certainly wouldn't advocate basing my decisions on the minority report and ignoring the consensus.

That is not to say that we cannot learn anything from the data available. They all show continued warming. Some a little more, some a little less. It is safe to say that the world is warming and CO2 is the cause. I think we agree on that point.

Regarding taking the top down approaches that you have suggested:1) Directing investments towards research in future energy technologies. Not a bad idea, but I'm not sure that we should allow the government to pick the winners and losers. There are approaches that would allow the market to guide us towards new technologies. Have you considered these?

2) Directing infrastructure investments in anticipation of future warming. This is problematic for a number of reasons: A) We will have ever escalating infrastructure costs until we address the root cause. B) How much warming should we plan for? 0.8C or 6C? We'd still need to pick a number here. C) it is again a big government solution.

Have you considered a more market friendly approach to addressing the issue?

Why start in 1995? Only because that's the year we happenend to be discussing.

R-squared isn't a particularly significant statistic for the purpose of measuring warming imho. We can't expect temperature growth to be linear, since there are natural effects that create lots of short-term and medium-term variability. What's important is the long-term rate of warming.

I think all the methodologies for measuring global temperature have serious flaws. Here's where I see us.

1. We don't know how fast the earth has been warming, due to methodology problems2. We don't know how much of the warming has been natural and how much caused by man.3. Even if we knew past global temperatures, we wouldn't know how fast future warming will be, as a function of CO2 emissions. 4. We don't know if the warming and CO2 emissions do more harm or more good. Growth in CO2 and warming may have done more good than harm, so far.5. Even if we truly wanted to reduce the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere, that goal is impossible under current technology and current geo-political situation.

Lots of people and organizations benefit from the supposed effort to fight global warming by cutting CO2. Some people make a lot of money. Some organizations, lkke the UN, gain power. The EPA has an excuse to promote programs they believe in. Politicians can attack their opponents on this issue. People get a chance to feel virtuous. Lots of government money gets allocated. Papers get published. Prestige can be enhanced.

It isn't justified to start calculating a trend in 1995. Just 20 years. As UAH's own data show, the 1998 El Nino (=natural variability) caused a spike of about 0.6 C. So it easily overwhelms a trend that is expected to be about 0.15 C/decade.

If one starts their trend in Jan 1999, the trend is about twice that starting in Jan 1995. If one starts in Jan 1993, the trend is over twice as large.

In other words, these short trends are quite sensitive to the exact starting point. You are mostly measuring natural variability, not an change in the background state due to humans.

I totally agree. Two corollaries1. We have little understanding of short-term and medium global warming causes and trends.2. Given the weaknesses in the models, the observed trend of around 0.15C/decade may be as good an estimate of the long-term rate of warming as we can currently come up with.

I'm afraid that link doesn't work. I have less confidence in those models than in common sense. Man's emissions were too small to affect the climate prior to 1960 or so. Yet, there were sharp rises and sharp declines in temperature duuring the period 1880 - 1960. These movements show that natural processes had a major effect on global temperature. There's no reason to think that natural processes stopped affecting global warming (which is not to deny that man's activity has a big impact.)

The planet generally warmed from 1800 to 1960 due to natural causes. Science doesn't have a good understanding of the natural processes that caused this warming. So, I don't see how they can be sure that these processes ended in 1960.

I've been spending a bit of time trying to understand satellite measurements of tropospheric microwave brightness. I came across this post by Geert Jan van Oldenborgh at Ed Hawkins web site: http://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2014/temperature-lower-troposphere/ I'll quote a bit of it.

"The global mean TLT differs from the global mean near-surface temperature in a few key aspects. One of them is that the influence of El Niño is much larger, as can be seen from, e.g., the height of the peak in 1998, which is about 0.4 K above the trend line, against about 0.2 K in the near-surface temperature. Note that strongest effects of El Niño on temperature lag the event itself by about half a year. The 2010 peak is also higher, about 0.2 K versus only 0.1 K. On a map, this can be seen as a stronger and broader response to El Niño and La Niña in the tropics, see Fig. 2. The amplification can easily be understood due to the stronger warming at height caused by the heat of condensation of the higher rainfall. This is the upper tropospheric warming that accompanies an increase in SST in the tropics. In the deep tropics, near the equator, this causes heating well above the lower troposphere and hence is not clearly visible in the TLT, but away from the equator the warmer air descends in the Hadley circulation and enters the heights to which the TLT is more sensitive."

The last sentence is the one I want to draw attention to. I already knew that the satellite measurements are very sensitive to the ENSO cycle. I wasn't quite sure why though. Geert is saying that the extra heat released due to condensation during the El Nino is the reason 1998 and 2010 have such large spikes. In essence this is the mechanism by which the tropical troposphere is supposed to warm faster than the surface (the so-called tropospheric hot spot). However, without the El Nino, Geert says you don't see this effect so clearly in the satellite data for the tropical troposphere because the hot spot is far above the TLT. It's my own presumption that if you look for it in the satellite data further up, then you have contamination from the stratosphere, which is more or less cooling.

Mark, thanks for the comment. Yes, I had seen that on Nick Stokes' blog. It's one of the go-to blogs I read regularly. (I was interested especially in his recent post that NASA GISS will show an anomaly of 1.15C for December. Further below, I estimated the probability that 2015 will be the warmest year at 94% for NASA, 97% for NOAA. I may have slightly underestimated those probabilities. We'll find out next week.)

Good comment above about the satellite measurements. I have a question perhaps you can answer. We know that to get the temperature of oxygen molecules about 4 km above the surface one needs to take the antenna temperature and then solve the radiation transfer equation and work backwards. That equation is a function of the temperature and pressure in the atmosphere. Do you know if the emission received by the radiometer is a function of the water vapor concentration along the path length? And if so, how do they account for that?

JoeT -I do not know the answer to your last question (I wrote a few guesses then erased them, because I'm not a fan of such speculations on blogs -and I would really be just guessing wildly).

You and David A. have probably seen this before, but I post this comment by R.E.Swanson, from an open letter he wrote to Lamar Smith, for readers' benefit:

"The important point to remember from all of this is that the TMT [temperature, middle troposphere] is not useful for measuring climate change and the TLT [temperature lower troposphere] is highly theoretical. In spite of being aware of these limits, Spencer and Christy have presented the TMT in testimony to Congress, showing a comparison between the TMT and the results of computer simulations, both globally and over the tropics. What they don’t mention is that to produce their graphic, they have simulated the orbital altitude TMT measurements from the GCM results (3), using CMIP5 data from the KNMI Climate Explorer website (4). The model results from KNMI are monthly averages and include only temperatures at 3 pressure levels, the surface, 500mb and 200mb pressure height, as I understand it. The method to translate those monthly values into simulated TMT results remains an unpublished mystery.

...I think these facts provide very good reasons to discount the “satellite temperature” data when assessing the climate change resulting from mankind’s activities adding CO2 to the atmosphere."

Mark, I appreciate your reluctance to speculate. As a physicist myself, I'm a big fan of asking questions when I don't know something. I see that yourself and Layzej already weighed in at Sou's hotwhopper site which has a very nice discussion of satellite measurements. I got a response to my question from climatologist Peter Thorne (who showed that RATPAC data showed good agreement with calculations of tropical troposphere warming rate). He wrote,

"The MSU is mainly outside that spectrum (50-58GHz). That range of the spectrum is almost uniquely determined by the vibration of Oxygen molecules with temperature dependence. The effects of water vapour are minimal but there is a scattering effect from water/ice droplets which means there is an issue in very heavily precipitating clouds."

So I actually got to learn something. The other take-away from Thorne is the negative kernel which led RSS to refuse to calculate a TLT product for some time.

Layzej wrote:"Oh, I see. If you use the as yet unpublished adjustments to the UAH data set you can find little warming. Good job. I wonder why this beta version differs so much from the published version? Has the UAH data set been wrong all this time? Is this new adjusted version correct?"